Katherine MacLean 9 min read

The beings stand around his bed in air suits and fishbowl helmets, apologetic, though it was no fault of theirs that they came to Earth much too late.

Katherine MacLean's 1953 story is a haunting, humane first-contact and post-apocalyptic tale. Sharp, moving golden-age SF. Read it for a quietly powerful story where gentle aliens arrive at a devastated Earth, and a dying human narrator reckons, with unexpected tenderness, what humanity was and what it did.

In its time

Published in 1953, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

9 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

Burchard